On March 16, 2018, at around 21:00 local time (UTC+2), an alleged Turkish airstrike hit the main hospital of the Kurdish-majority city of Afrin, in northwestern Syria, where Turkey and allied Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups are engaging in an offensive against the People’s Protection Units (Kurdish: Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG). The YPG and the…
On June 28, 2017, two Turkish media outlets published footage of a location within Syrian territory where the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK, from Turkish Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri) “allegedly will build a base” if it “enters” the Idlib governorate. Firstly, A Haber broadcasted a short reportage with “impressions” from Idlib. A Haber is a nationwide Turkish…
A video and a report published by the Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency (AA) presents an alternative course of events for May 16, 2017. This article analyses both the visual evidence and the written account. In the described course of events in both accounts, AA largely blames the pro-Kurdish/anti-Erdoğan protesters for the violence. However, a closer look at the presented imagery and the statements made in the video and the report reveals that some claims made by AA are wrong, others are misleading in the given context and some are not supported by facts.
On Tuesday, May 16, nearly a dozen people were injured after a clash between pro-Kurdish/anti-Erdoğan protesters and a group that included both Erdoğan supporters and Turkish security officials, including bodyguards of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The clash happened outside of the Turkish Ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C., and marks the second instance since 2016 where Turkish security officials were…
The Turkish military operation dubbed ‘Euphrates Shield’ (ES) began on August 24, 2016, aiming to clear an area of 5,000 square kilometres of Syrian territory, and is conducted jointly with Syrian rebel factions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Within four months, over 2,000 square kilometres were captured from so-called Islamic State (IS) and Kurdish…
On the night from October 19 to October 20, the Turkish Air Force bombed positions allegedly of the People’s Protection Units (Kurdish: Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) in Syria’s Aleppo governorate. This is a brief overview of open source information on the incident. Geolocation In total, the Turkish Air Force dropped 26 bombs on 18 different targets,…
As Turkey pushes toward becoming a major player in the UAV industry, seeing more of their drones on satellite imagery beyond test airfields should come as no surprise. DigitalGlobe space snapshots from October 2015 captured one of the country’s latest drones, the Bayraktar TB2, complete with its ground control station, parked in front of an…
A group of plotters of the failed Turkish coup attempt used a WhatsApp group to communicate with each other. Bellingcat has transcribed, translated, and analysed the conversation, thereby cross-referencing the messages with photos, videos, and news reports of the evening, night, and morning of July 15-16. The transcript is composed of two different sources. The…
Iran has sent another model of drone to northern Syria, according to imagery posted on social media in the latter half of 2015. Pictures of wreckage taken inside Syria indicate that Turkey shot down the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in a May border incident in which Turkish officials claimed the aircraft violated Turkish airspace. The drone also…
Videos of airstrikes targeting an alleged bakery in Syria’s Idlib Governorate sparked heavy debates on social media. The Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (İHH) said it manages the bakery with funding from the Qatar Charity. This article examines what we can and cannot know so far about the airstrikes, using open source intelligence (OSINT). It establishes several certainties, but…
